Grace Management Group: A 40+ years history of the family-owned company. From a greenhouse business to a fragrance company, with four big brands, a fully in-house production cycle, and dedicated charity give-backs.

Bridgewater Candles
Greanleaf Gifts
Votivo
Fresh Scents

Bucky Rogers, a Direct to Consumer Project Manager at Grace Management Group, shared his experience of using the MBC Bundles App and the company's inspiring story.

Short Brand Story

The Brand Story is quite interesting, as it all started as a greenhouse business. The owners, Bob and Sylvia Caldwell, raised plants, and the majority of what they raised were poinsettias for Christmas. One year they had a crop of poinsettias that bloomed in July instead of blooming in December, causing the entire crop loss and the need to look for new opportunities. Once, armed with an idea Sylvia brought back from a craft show, they created an original scented envelope sachet.

Our company was the first worldwide to produce a sachet and its product, Greenleaf, entered the home fragrance market over 40 years ago. So that led to the development of a fragrance house. For now, we have a whole lab of the perfumers downstairs in our office that are developing and mixing fragrances. We are completely vertically integrated. Fragrances, oils, everything that goes into our candles - all of that are produced here in our facility. Fully in-house production started with that one sachet product and then slowly increased to the other home fragrance products like oil reed, diffusers, candles and auto vent clips that go in your car, and all kinds of different things.
The Caldwell family has always been very much into yes, producing a profit, but producing a profit that helps people.
For example, two of our four brands have dedicated give-backs. Greenleaf Gifts has a give-back to the three different agencies, that are fighting against human trafficking. Bridgewater Candles has a give-back to an agency that is feeding kids overseas.

A significant part of the company's profit goes to those two things and the owners are very, very serious about that. The company has never stopped these give-backs and has not pulled back the percentages, or anything like that when there were economic downturns. These non-profit organizations that they had made a promise to are their priority.
Grace Management Group is a great family-owned company, and it is very clear what its goals are.

How does MBC Bundles App help you?

Since installing the app, we have seen increased average order value for all brands, which as you know, is a key metric, particularly in the shipping environment: the ability to get average order value up – always saves money in the long run because of shipping. So we have seen average order value going up in all brands across our four sites. We have earned almost $50,000 within the last two months using the MBC Bundles App. And we honestly have not even fully exhausted what your bundling app can do yet. We just have not had time to fully flesh out our whole bundling strategy.

It has been successful from an average order value standpoint, and successful from the sales standpoint with just a few initial bundles. Probably, the biggest success for us is that we have a department in our manufacturing facility, we call them special handling, and they used to be in charge of pre-making fixed bundles that we used to put on our site when we have not been using a bundling app yet. That increased labor costs, the amount of time used in our facility, that increased even the amount of space needed in a facility. We used to have racks full of these pre-made bundles. And now all we have to do is just have our single item SKUs on the line, and we can pull from those. It’s just magic!
So happening upon you was a huge blessing to us. Because every major metric that an e-commerce manager uses to determine success has gotten better because of the use of this app.

Did you have any funny moments or challenges while working with us?

Honestly, there have not been any challenges yet. And you know, I'm sure at some point there will be, but it has all been very smooth so far. I think you all are committed to making your app better, and you're committed to making sure that your customers are equipped to do what they need to do with your app. And even today's conversation has kind of shown that even when your app doesn't currently do what we need to do, you're willing to at least look at the possibility of being able to make that fix.

MBC Bundles has been working great for us. It is very easy to set up the bundles, it integrates with Shopify very well. I've not seen any kind of glitches or anything like that, and a few glitches that we have seen you, guys, have fixed very quickly. So, honestly, to find an app to use or an app developer having a fast-responsive support team – is very rare. I can tell that based on my experience of all of the apps we have used. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes weeks to hear back, to get a solution for something. And so I mean, that just that fact for me has made being with your bundling app worth it.

Updated on: 05/07/2022